4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

weapons. On March 20, 1968, Colonel Paul Akst, director of New York
City’s selective service system, was talking to Columbia University students
about the tough new draft law put in force at the height of the
Vietnam war.
As Akst began fielding questions from the floor, a group of students
created a diversion at the rear of the auditorium, and as everyone in
the audience turned around, an unidentified assailant walked up to the
colonel and pushed a lemon meringue pie squarely in his face.
(Avorn 1968: 32)
A pie in the face is not just any action, but one drawn from the stock
repertory of burlesque and early movies. The student uprisings of 1968
in Europe and America combined farce and eroticism with radical
thought and action. The first phase of a victorious revolution – look at
France in 1792, the USSR in 1917 – is often a carnival; the next phase is
a vituperative bloodbath.
Ludwig Jekels, a follower of Freud, interprets comedy in a unique
way. If the Oedipus complex is the basis of tragedy, he argues, then its
opposite underlies farce: “the feeling of guilt which, in tragedy, rests
upon the son, appears in comedy displaced on the father; it is the father
who is guilty” (Jekels 1965: 264). Once the father – the authority of
the old (state) – is done away with “we find the ego, which has liberated
itself from the tyrant, uninhibitedly venting its humor, wit, and
every sort of comic manifestation in a very ecstasy of freedom” (Jekels
1965: 264). In revolution the liberation is actual, if temporary; in
aesthetic theater, in even the Kogu court and other “near-dramas,” the
liberation is monitored, controlled, overseen by authorities who give
permission for the temporary suspension of the usual order of things.
In this way rebellion is co-opted, serving the powers that be.
IN-GROUP, OUT-GROUP
ethology and theater 283
From an ethological perspective rituals evolve as a way of improving
communications, removing ambiguities, making signals clear. These
signals are preponderantly directed at conspecifics. Behavior in relation
to animals of another species is likely to be more “direct”: fight, flight,